What I saw was at once more and less than that. I saw a life. A new way of being. I saw the thing I had always wanted.
Mark and I both had difficult childhoods. I was moved from school to school every few years and never managed to find any proper friends. This pales in comparison to Mark’s experience. His dad beat him. Not a couple of ill-advised slaps for being naughty. Proper, old-fashioned, barbaric beating. Once, he told me, his mother put concealer on him to go into school, to cover the bruising around his eye. She didn’t stop his father. She couldn’t. Not as frequently – but every so often – she was the victim of one of his fits of temper herself. When he was younger, Mark was small for his age, and used to get pummelled on the rugby pitch, to his dad’s disdain. Then he began to grow. He drank protein powder shakes and hit the gym. The beatings finally stopped; as though his father had suddenly come to the realisation that his son might be able to fight back: and win.
Mark has inherited something of his dad’s temper. He throws his weight around. He has never been violent with me … though there have been just a couple of times in the midst of a particularly explosive argument when I have felt he’s on the edge. A door slammed with such force that the wood fractured, a picture we’d disagreed about, smashed against a wall. But he’s not the unfeeling bonehead that people might assume. Last night he may have joked about that incident at the races, but I remember the remorse afterwards, his horror at what he had done … how he was almost in tears hearing that boy had been taken to hospital. I had to stop him from going and turning himself in.
Mark desperately does not want to turn out like his father. But I also know that, at times, he is frightened that he is becoming him.
MIRANDA
I wake early. Julien is curled away from me beneath the sheet. Immediately memories of last night arrive, all looped together and unclear, like a tangled ball of wool. Mark – in the bathroom. The way he had towered over me, the threat of his grip upon my upper arm.
I get up and dress. I’ll go for a run, try to breathe the weirdness of last night from my lungs. I like running now. I’ve come to like it – it hasn’t always been the case. I didn’t like it at fourteen, when I suddenly went up a couple of sizes and my darling mother got me a gym membership for my birthday.
I sprint past the other cabins and the Lodge as quickly as I can. I really don’t want to see any of the others yet. I haven’t got my face on – and I don’t mean make-up. I mean tough, fun, up-for-anything Miranda. When I reach the dark shelter of the trees that edge the loch and there has been no call of ‘Where are you off to?’ I breathe a sigh of relief.
Mark: how dare he? I’m tempted to tell Emma, today. But I can tell how hard she’s worked to bring this all together, how much pride she takes in having found such an awesome place – I’m not quite so insensitive to that sort of thing as people think. So maybe I should wait until afterwards, broach it over drinks with her in London. She must have seen that side of him, mustn’t she? If he was like that with me, how does he behave with her? She seems so capable, so in charge of her life, but – as I well know – the face we present to the world can be misleading.
The air is noticeably colder today. Some of the puddles of rainwater seem to have frozen overnight. There’s an edge, a rawness, to this cold that is unfamiliar. A chilly day in London is always offset by the warm blasts from overheated shops, the stickiness of the tube, the press of other bodies. But here the cold has a chance to get you properly in its grip. It feels a little like I’m trying to outrun it.
I’ve taken my phone with me so I can listen to music – I find it always helps to relax me, drowns out all the other noise in my head. Much better than the ‘mindful silence’ my therapist is so bloody keen on. As promised, the little signal indicator is empty. Funny, that we live in a world now where a lack of connectivity might be advertised as a feature in itself.
A few yards ahead, the path forks off towards another jetty. It’s a perfectly beautiful, melancholy spot. I jog down towards it. There are canoes stacked here, presumably from the summer season – one is on its bottom, and has filled with a winter’s worth of rainwater, now frozen solid. I stand over it, and as I look inside it’s as if my reflection is trapped beneath the surface of ice – as though I am trapped in there. I shiver, though I’m well wrapped up against the cold. I head back to the path.
I’ve run perhaps two hundred yards along the rutted track we drove along last night, the forest on one side of me, the loch on the other, when I come to a bridge spanning one of the waterfalls that feeds the loch. The waterfall itself is overlooked by a small, derelict-looking building. I wonder what on earth it is. I hang over the edge of the bridge – there’s just three lines of chain between myself and the void – and look down at the waterfall itself, now mainly frozen into icicles, and the black, moss-covered rocks.
Beyond this, the path is uneventful for a stretch. But at one point I come to a small patch of burned ground, a circle, as though someone has lit a fire here. Nearby are a couple of burned, rusted beer cans. I remember what Heather told us about poachers.
I step off the pass onto the bank that shears down to the water, ducking my way through the branches of the trees at the lochside, stumbling and slipping over ancient moss-covered roots, twigs snagging at my hair, face and jacket. At one point I almost lose my footing entirely and begin slithering towards a small inlet of water to my right, only just regaining my balance at the last minute. As I do I catch sight of something gleaming beneath the surface. Shocking white, so much brighter than the brownish rocks surrounding it. I peer closer, and realise what it is. A bone. Quite a large one, half concealed by rotted leaves. As I look about me I see another – and another, scattered about the grassy bank. Some are even larger than the one in the water, as long as my own femur. They are animal bones, I know this. I tell myself this, as I search for the skull that will confirm it. An animal killed by another animal, or dead from old age. But some of them, I see, have scorch marks. And there is no skull to be seen. Again, I remember the warning about poachers trespassing; perhaps they’ve taken the heads away for mounting. I shudder. The killing of something this size must have involved a certain amount of violence, and intent.
I need to put some space between myself and this place. The grisly discovery sits queasily on my empty stomach. So I push myself going up the slight incline until I can focus only on the burn in my lungs and legs. I remind myself what a beautiful place this is. The bones have sent a chill through me, put a dark cast on things. But there is nothing sinister here. It is just different, I remind myself. Remote, wild.